MoJo Author Feeds: Bradford Matsen | Mother Joneshttp://www.motherjones.com/rss/authors/15924
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enTravel to Exotic Foreign Lands! See Beautiful Coral Reefs! And Kill Them!http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1998/05/travel-exotic-foreign-lands-see-beautiful-coral-reefs-and-kill-them
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<html><body><p><font size="+3">M</font>y route to the front lines of the campaign to save coral reefs in the Caribbean takes me over the concrete, steel, and glass landscape of South Florida. Fifty years ago, heat, bugs, disease, snakes, hurricanes, and all manner of natural uncertainty swatted cities and settlements away like pests. Then air conditioning, interstate highways, and DDT hastened our rush to live in comfort and profit from the tropical extremes of this tender peninsula. We thought of the coastal morass as a wasteland, a problem to be solved, rather than as a natural means for filtering and easing our impact on the land and sea around us. By now we've traded most of that great swamp, its upstream watersheds, and its coastline for a place where millions of people live, grow sugarcane, launch rockets, drive to work, go to football games, and take the kids to Disney World&#151;all the while, in the surrounding waters of the Keys and Caribbean, coral reefs are dead or dying. </p></body></html>
<p style="font-size: 1.083em;"><a href="/politics/1998/05/travel-exotic-foreign-lands-see-beautiful-coral-reefs-and-kill-them"><strong><em>Continue Reading &raquo;</em></strong></a></p>PoliticsFri, 01 May 1998 07:00:00 +0000Bradford Matsen15925 at http://www.motherjones.comThe Salmon Are Callinghttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/1994/11/salmon-are-calling
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<html><body><p> The week of my birthday in 1981, a stroke of luck dropped me at a salmon-counting station on the Naknek River, a tundra artery in Alaska that empties into the Bering Sea. As it has for centuries, the river throbbed with millions of salmon riding the peak of the solar waltz into a new generation. In their metamorphic overture to reproducing themselves, the beautiful silver voyagers were becoming hook-nosed, humpbacked nightmares in shades of bad bruises. At the counting station, set in a muddy oxbow on the river, a rookie biologist had staked a snow-white tarp from bank to bank, against which he could better see passing salmon. Every half hour, through the 20-hour subarctic summer days, he or his assistant would climb a 30-foot tower of aluminum tubing and plywood to count them. </p></body></html>
<p style="font-size: 1.083em;"><a href="/politics/1994/11/salmon-are-calling"><strong><em>Continue Reading &raquo;</em></strong></a></p>PoliticsTue, 01 Nov 1994 08:00:00 +0000Bradford Matsen15356 at http://www.motherjones.comBlues in the Key of Seahttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/1994/07/blues-key-sea
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<html><body><p> </p><h2> AT THE DARK END OF THE STREAM </h2> About 90 percent of the world's fish come from the near-shore waters over the continental shelves. Life is vigorous in these ocean shallows because sunlight drives the marine food chain. The quickest way to kill these fish is to build cities like Los Angeles, New York, or London. More than half of the world's population lives near a coast, and that's the rub. Pollution, dams, and wetlands destruction can be just as efficient fish killers as factory trawlers. For starters, we pour almost as much oil down city drains in a year as 20 Exxon Valdez wrecks would spill.</body></html>
<p style="font-size: 1.083em;"><a href="/politics/1994/07/blues-key-sea"><strong><em>Continue Reading &raquo;</em></strong></a></p>PoliticsFri, 01 Jul 1994 07:00:00 +0000Bradford Matsen20037 at http://www.motherjones.comWhat should you eat?http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1994/07/what-should-you-eat
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<html><body><p> Since we started sending ships around the world with giant trawls, miles of longlines, nets, and floating factories, we have lost our sense of responsibility for the fish that were once our neighbors. The nicest thing you can do for the fish you're eating is to make sure you know who its relatives are and where it lived before it ended up on your fork or in a bun with cheese and tartar sauce. Becoming a responsible consumer takes work, but here are some basics: </p></body></html>
<p style="font-size: 1.083em;"><a href="/politics/1994/07/what-should-you-eat"><strong><em>Continue Reading &raquo;</em></strong></a></p>PoliticsFri, 01 Jul 1994 07:00:00 +0000Bradford Matsen20041 at http://www.motherjones.com